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For 2 units, plus a third already shut down one on the site, this is not too bad a cost. Considering the overall lifetime cost of the plant, including D&D, and even though it shut down early, on a cost per kwh basis, it is a good deal for emission free generation.

Unfortunately, many will look at the cost and not have a good perspective / basis for comparison.

For 2 units, plus a third already shut down one on the site, this is not too bad a cost..

But we could do it for far less if we mothballed the plant for a decade or two while developing robots to do most of the dismantling work. Using humans to handle radioactive materials is very expensive.

Where are the rad-hardened teleoperators we need for nuclear cleanup now? Quotations of generations-long cleanup times strike me as a ploy to make future reactors "too expensive" by inflating decommissioning costs. Ditto for us not opening that already-built safe storage facility in Nevada.

"too cheap to meter" certainly was an over enthusiastic optimism with nuclear as it was first being deployed. We all know that, but it doesn't make it a bad deal. I never understood the simpleton argument that this was somehow a failure. I guess its just easy to repeat without making an actual point.

They believe that because not all objectives were met, the whole thing was a complete failure.

Sure, but making it "too cheap to meter" was never an objective. In fact, nobody ever predicted that would happen. The "too cheap to meter" prediction was made by Lewis Strauss [wikipedia.org] in reference to eventual hydrogen fusion power. He was not talking about conventional fission reactors.

Seriously. Listen to the linked audio. Thorium or whatnot will be more difficult to obtain and maintain than Uranium - creating new classes of super-expensive "conflict minerals" - rapidly exhausting sources as expensive, horrible wars are fought.

Yeah. That's flat out bullshit.

Thorium is several orders of magnitude more prevalent in the earth than Uranium. There are a number of fairly large rare-earth mines in the US that are shut down because they're bringing up too much Thorium. This is why China has a lock on rare earths right now. They don't give a shit WHAT they bring up, or what it does. People are cheap and unmonitored dumping is even cheaper.

Additionally, this is why China's got such a hard-on for LFTR

Also, the Thorium yearly tailings brought up by just a few US rare earths mines could power the entire energy needs of the country at current consumption levels for several YEARS.

So there's exactly ZERO "conflict materials" involved. Whoever dreamed this up must pay exactly zero attention to a thing we like to refer to as "reality".

It still doesn't change the fact that the types of Uranium currently used in existing nuclear power plants is orders of magnitude rarer than Thorium. Plus there's the problems of enrichment and weaponization.

In a Thorium reactor, you don't enrich Thorium. And any uranium bred in the reactor is unsuitable for bomb making.

Thorium is also a byproduct of rare earth refining. We can get the thorium we need for free as the electronics business drives more mining of RE elements. Until now it has been considered a useless liability.

Existing stakeholders have put a lot into Uranium and were willing to lobby the Clinton era government to get a Thorium research reactor shut down and hound the head of that project out of the nuclear industry. He dared to suggest that a Thorium reactor would be safer which implied that existing reactors were not safe enough. While that was years ago it seems to be the end of the matter as far as the USA goes.

There are two observationally stable byproducts at Tl203 and Tl205.
The most stable of the remaining isotopes has a half-life of just under 4 years. Most of the rest are measured in hours, seconds and in some cases, milliseconds.
So yes, it's very "hot". But it's extremely short-lived.

Thanks for pointing that out and also much appreciated about not being a dick about it.

I checked my notes at home and they were about Thallium 208. I agree, I want to learn more so I can have a reasoned and measured response. Unfortunately I see the nuclear mod trolls are out in force again.

I have nothing against this type of reactor technology, in principle however I'd like to know more about it's spent fuel byproducts and operational effluents. It is important to understand that if the halflife is thr

Fixating on that one point is an extremely simplistic argument that seeks to ignore the real issues. Nuclear is extremely expensive, and only appears cheap in the US because of massive subsidy.

It's actually so expensive that the UK couldn't find anyone to build new plants, and the only people who were eventually willing demanded special rates well above the normal unit cost of electricity to be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. That's on top of all the other subsidies already on offer.

It's also worth pointing out that the $4.4bn and 20 year timescale is not the real cost of decommissioning. They are not returning the land to its original state where it could be redeveloped. They are merely encasing the reactors and leaving them to deal with later at additional cost. It also doesn't include the cost of storing material from the decommissioning process that is contaminated for an indefinite period of time. To give you an idea the UK is doing all that to some reactors that were shut down in the early 90s, costing tens of billions of pounds and estimated to take around 80 years for competition (plus indefinite storage of waste from the process, not including spent fuel).

It's actually so expensive that the UK couldn't find anyone to build new plants, and the only people who were eventually willing demanded special rates well above the normal unit cost of electricity to be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. That's on top of all the other subsidies already on offer.

Gas is cheap let's build that. There'll never be aaaaaaaany problem getting gas from the Russians. No sireee. Never mind that local fracking won't supply enough gas.

Nuclear is only the most expensive option when you stubbornly ignore the externalities.

The options are:1. Renewables (not enough to supply the entire country even using rather optimistic estimates).2. Coal which is cheap and astonishingly filthy.3. Gas from Russia.4. Nuclear.

The thing is the prices are set by the free market. The free market ignores externalities such as pollution and is purely reactive so it never makes a strategically wise choice. Gas is the cheapest option right now, but is not the wisest choice.

This is why we have governments. Left to itself, the free market does not make the best decisions.

The UK has enough renewables and our North Sea gas for all its requirements. We have excellent wind and wave resources, and lots of existing hydro electricity. Even coal with carbon capture isn't too bad, and much cheaper than nuclear.

The options are:1. Renewables (not enough to supply the entire country even using rather optimistic estimates).

The UK has immense areas available for offshore wind.

3. Gas from Russia.4. Nuclear.

5. Gas from Qatar6. Gas from the United States (which has plenty to export)7. Gas from Poland (which has huge shale deposits that will be producing gas long before the new nukes are operational)8. Import even more nuclear power from France, so it is subsidized by French taxpayers rather than British consumers.

The reality of your assertion is that nuclear using technology that drove weapons development is expensive to use. LFTR technology appears magnitudes cheaper from the work I've seen conduced at Oak Ridge. UK problems with nuclear have more to do with maintaining 50-year old technologies. I'm sure the people in India right now building LFTRs aren't losing a penny. LFTRs process the waste from previous systems as fuel. Imagine that.

India has been trying to build LFTRs for decades at enormous cost. Ask yourself why no-one in the US is building these wonderful things. Could it be the immense cost and uncertainty about how well and reliably they will work in practice? Nah, blame "environmentalists".

To be convincing you'd need to show that nuclear subsidies are completely incomparable to all other energy sources

No. This is wrong. He isn't claiming that nuclear is the WORST, just that it is bad. To show that nuclear doesn't make sense, he only has to show that ONE other option is cheaper, better for the environment, and has a similar load profile. Gas+CCS almost certainly meets that criteria. In many locations, wind is already cheaper than nukes, and the cost of wind energy is falling, while the costs of nukes is rising, as we realize that early designs took dangerous shortcuts, and decommissioning costs excee

[citation needed] and here's why: When a wind farm is shut down, it becomes valuable scrap. It can literally just be knocked over, since you don't care what condition it's in when you scrap it. When a nuclear plant is shut down, it's dangerous nuclear waste. Not just the fuel, but parts of the plant itself. So you literally could not be more wrong. We're talking about materials which are valuable versus materials which are anti-valuable.

Except the real world examples you gave (France and China) are bogus. In both places, the nukes are government owned and operated, have opaque finances, and sell into some of the most expensive energy markets in the world. The French pay about three times as much for electricity as Americans.

Funnily enough it is a French-Chinese partnership that is building our new reactors. No British company will touch them. We are handing our basic infrastructure over to companies that have little interest in what is best for the UK and no real stake in what happens to us because they have a guaranteed profit for the lifetime of the plant.

Subsidy isn't always bad in itself, if it leads us somewhere worth going. Nuclear is on the way out though, we should be looking elsewhere.

San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal [ap.org] and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE [scpr.org] lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer [kcet.org] and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.

Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)

The world has already seen what becomes of nuclear power without regulation and the threat of lawsuits. They serve an important purpose.

Now, don't get me wrong, the public is quite moronic when it comes to nuclear power (or most anything else). But as in other areas, "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others." So what do you propose? Give free reign to unaccountablre technocrats (or cronies) appointed by a politician? Let some CEO make the final call?

While the actual generation of nuclear power in the plant may not have emitted CO2 or other burn products, you can hardly call this emissions free. Don't forget that mining the uranium ore, transporting the uranium ore and some more steps in the production process is done with fossil fuels. Nuclear waste is also a form of emission. Even if it's not directly related to greenhouse effects, it will cause severe effects on humans and nature if not taken care of (in an expensive way). All things considered, nucl

Yes, mining and those things does cause emissions. That is also true of Solar PV, for instance. Not only mining of the semiconductor materials, but there is also some nasty chemical processes used in manufacture, then transportation from Asia, delivering on land and so forth. So, you are correct, if you factor in those types of things, no source is emission free.

You can't even write English properly yet you're commenting on the intelligence of engineers? Fuck off.

The problems are political, not scientific or engineering related. The costs are driven up by a climate of constantly changing government regulation which is incredibly strict compared to coal. Your coal plants put more radioactive waste into the atmosphere every day than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime. You're the short-sighted one, fucking over the world you've borrowed from your children.

Decommissioning costs are still a lot less than it would cost to build the plant now. Letting the plant cool down for a few years makes the process simpler and safer, though the reactor vessel is going to be a challenge.

Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it, because Ted can declare bankruptcy on Southern California Edison, making the property a superfund site for taxpayers to pay for. SC Edison would then emege through chapter 11, restructure itself, and continue service in Southern California under another name. its precisely what Hooker Chemical Corporation did after the love canal disaster.

The money for the reactor's decommissioning comes from surcharges to electrical rates collected while the plant was in operation. This money was earmarked specifically for reactor decommissioning costs, and placed into a trust fund which currently contains about $2.7 billion (the $4.4 billion cost will be accrued over several decades, so interest on the $2.7 billion makes them more equal than the raw numbers suggest). That there is sufficient money despite the reactor shutting down only halfway through its expected lifetime means there's a huge margin for error in these nuclear decommissioning funds. Edison has said if there's any money left over, it'll be refunded to rate payers.

I hope my math is correct: Taking numbers from wikipedia [wikipedia.org], considering only units 2 and 3: both were in operation for a bit more than 29 years and were producing about 1 GW at full power. Ignoring any production time lost for maintenance (my guess is they would run with a duty cycle of 80-90%), the total amount of produced kWh would be: 29 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 2 GW = 5e14 Wh = 5e11 kWh. The price for the decommissioning would thus come down to around 4.4e9 $ / 5e11 kWh = 0.0086 $/kWh, so let's round it up to 1 cent per kWh. Average price for electricity in the US [eia.gov] seems to be around 0.10 $/kW, so the cost for the decommissioning seems acceptable, though not negligible.

Consider though that the cost of nuclear power is almost entirely in the construction and decommissioning of the reactors. The only other significant costs are labor and maintenance - the cost of nuclear fuel is negligible - some fraction of a cent per kWh, though of course there's also waste storage costs, whether they're paid in money or environmental contamination. Which makes the fact that fuel reprocessing is no longer the norm completely inexcusable - it virtually eliminates the long-term waste stor

Bullshit.From 1973 - 1979, about 40 planned reactors were cancelled because of fears of overcapacity. About 53 that were approved before TMI were completed although subject to more stringent oversight.Unit 1 of TMI was allowed to restart operations in '85 and is licensed to operate until 2034. Carter had described the overall event as minor to his cabinet after visiting the site.It's true that TMI & Carter did have a considerable impact on nuke plants in the USA but the event that really put the hurt on

Yes, it did not happen during his tenure because those decisions he instituted during his tenure required playing out through the minefield of regulation. Or do you live in a world where 100% of regulations display immediate feedback?

Carter was nowhere as anti-nuke as many think and considering that Reagan was very much pro-nuke ( and wasted no time removing the solar panels from the White House roof), he certainly had the motivation & wherewithal to reverse course.The truth is that TMI & Chernobyl galvanized public opinion and emboldened activists and the very high interest rates of the period, at one time over 20% and rarely below 8% prior to 1988, made the capital-intensive reactors very expensive to build while also battling

Thanks for showing the numbers. It would have worked out better, of course, had San O units operated for their 40 year life or longer. Many US nuclear plants are already licensed to operate for 60 years, so the relative cost might even be significantly lower in those cases, as well as a longer period of fund development.

The spent fuel is going to just be sitting there. So, they won't really be finishing the job of decommissioning. The waste at Humboldt Bay is vulnerable to sea level rise so the story there is even less complete.

Breeders blow up pretty often so you don't want to use those. But, transmutation without recycling looks pretty feasible as the cost of renewable energy plummets. Think of nuclear energy as borrowed energy which has to be payed back when the waste is transmuted to sable elements with an accelerator.

...to put those big scary "$4.4 billion" numbers in there without context. It sounds like a lot of money (especially to people unfamiliar with the industry) but that number is the retail value of approximately 18 months of electrical generation for units 2 & 3 at San Onofre.

They're also stuck storing the fuel on site until the federal government comes up with a spent fuel storage solution.

Or until there is a 4th gen reactor available to consume the old waste as its fuel. The waste of a 4th gen is only dangerous for a few centuries rather than tens of thousands of years. In other words 4th gen converts a 10,000 year problem into a 300 year problem, while generating power from "fuel" that has already been mined, processed, and paid for.

Once they've solved that tiny transmission and storage issue. Until then they can only work in conjunction with fossil fuel plants [globalpost.com] and play a minor role, so much so in fact that building wind today equals cementing coal & gas [thegwpf.org] into the mix.

God that was such a bunch of oversimplifications down to downright untruths it's hard to know where to start:

Zero realistic cost-analysis. Wind doesn't blow? No problem, solar is here to save the day! (Except that just doubled the cost in installed generation capacity). Wind AND solar not there? No problem, geothermal/hydro/whatever! (Triple the cost.) And how do you site so much geothermal or hydro capacity, considering most places either don't have them (geothermal) or are already maxed out (hydro). Als

Wow, fell at the first hurdle. Shame because I imagine a lot of people stopped reading there.

The wind is always blowing somewhere. In places where wind power is suitable you have a wide geographic distribution of turbines and constant, 24/356 energy. Obviously you need enough capacity to ensure a certain baseline, just like you need more coal plants or more reactors because sometimes they break down or need maintenance. Fortunately wind is cheap, getting cheaper and has very little environmental impact so t

I'll try to get through without banging my head against the table too often, but every time I see Amory Lovins' crap I just want to kill myself. The guy has a totally rosy idea of how electrical and mechanical systems actually work and how we control them. He frequently overestimates stuff, such as this: "Biomass would supply about six times more energy in 2050 than in 2010". Biomass is pure and utter bunk and is just a way to subsidize certain industries. Germany has a rather sizable biomass energy sector

Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll try to give it a read, I honestly don't care what gets us there (and by "there" I mean zero CO2). I don't think nuclear itself is the complete answer and we need a wide array of technologies to go with it. I just don't happen to think that discounting nuclear outright because of some knee jerk emotional reaction is a sensible thing to do. "Anything and everything that'll get the job done" is my motto.

1) do you really thing Germany has 60GW of interconnects with its neighbors?

2) wind lulls are strongly correlated across wide geographical areas (given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too a lull there is going to affect them all)

3) separate countries aren't exactly receptive to relying 100% on their neighbors for real-time energy control, as that externalizes a lot of political power

The original nuclear pioneers never thought of LWRs and enriched uranium being anything more than a stop-gap solution. They were very clear about the need for breeder reactors which would eventually consume the waste from LWRs.

There is at least one Gen IV reactor design pretty much ready to go today, but which was halted in the 90s by Clinton and Al Gore: the Integral Fast Reactor [wikipedia.org]. It can eat the waste from current day LWRs and reduce it much less dangerous fission product waste.

"We live in a culture where we think every janitor should get a $50 an hour benefit package and university students get sex change operations included in their health care plans, whose $50,000 costs are then paid for by federal student loans and federal taxpayer grants and, soon, federal health care underwriting."

PROTIP: Right-wing rant sites typically don't provide good scientific reporting. Do you imagine they would say "solar PV is wonderful, despite those subsidies and Chinese imports we hate so much"?

Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life? http://www.science20.com/scien [science20.com]...

Modern solar panels are highly recyclable (they're designed for it) and they're also designed not to leach when landfilled. Yes, the old panels have these problems, but since solar has really never taken off to the feasible extent, that problem is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by coal (soot, radioactive atmospheric waste), natural gas (fracking) and by oil (etc etc) to say nothing of nuclear (even france has been dumping waste in russia.) The FUD you linked was outdated when it was new.

France's overall price of electricity with tax is lower than Denmark's untaxed price, meanwhile emitting >30% less CO2 per capita [worldbank.org] with a very similar GDP per capita [wikipedia.org] (to within 5%). If we limit our consideration to electricity, France has ~75% lower emissions [co2benchmark.com] per MWh generated than Denmark; and over 80% lower than Germany, the renewable powerhouse of the continent. In fact, they have so much zero-CO2 electricity that they can afford to offset the CO2 emissions [templar.co.uk] from many of their neighbors via transmission. Also keep in mind that France has had this CO2 per kWh value for the better part of two decades because its power mix has always been ~70-80% nuclear and ~15% hydro (the rest being filled in with things like gas, hence why this CO2/kWh number isn't a flat zero).

The OECD average is so high mostly because of heavy polluters like the US [worldbank.org], being the about 1/4 of the population of the entire OECD [wolframalpha.com] (not just the high-income bracket), but twice the per capita CO2 emissions of, say, Germany.

To preemptively dispense with the "we can't build it fast enough" criticism of nuclear, I again present the example of... France. They initially started construction in 1974 [wikipedia.org] and finished installing >50 reactors, hitting over 70% of generation capacity, within 15 years. So don't believe the renewable industry talking points of "it can't be done on time". It has been done before and it can be done again. If it had the political and popular will, Denmark could hit its CO2-reduction targets for electricity for 2050 some 20 years earlier.

I do think that France's build-out of nuclear plants was impressive but your worship of them should be tempered by a couple facts.

First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.The normal peak power prices are usually below $100 per MW-hr.A warming climate will lead to this happening more frequently.

Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia. The lie was that it was sent to be separated and re-enriched to be returned but the truth is that 90% never comes back.Right now, it seems that no one who has a significant build-up of nuclear waste is doing a proper job of managing it. Who knows how much has been dumped in backwater nations or into the oceans. And that's with nuclear providing 12% of global electricity.What will the waste problem look like if we try to get to 50% in a hurry? Those thorium trolls may be right but it's not likely we'll know for sure before 2030.

First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.

This would be true of almost any heat engine-based power plant, regardless of the source of the heating, save for a few very high-temperature systems which can live with air cooling. Also, a 30% reduction in production from an 70-80% resource implies an overall shortfall of ~20% - we know how to bridge those temporary loss gaps with hydro, fossil and other dispatchable short-term backup technology. Wind, meanwhile, experiences periodic 1-2 week long shortfalls of

France regularly has to import electricity during the summer and winter because it doesn't have enough capacity, often due to plants being forced offline for various reasons. Essentially they use the rest of Europe as variable capacity, and Germany in particular makes a lot of money from that.

I don't know how you can make any claims about the cost of French electricity with a straight face. Clearly the price is heavily subsidized, with the subsidy going to the nuclear energy industry. Like all commercial nu

Have a look over here [templar.co.uk] and look specifically at the German interconnect. You'll see that it spends a majority of the time in the negative, meaning, power is going out over the link TO Germany. If you also look at the nuclear generation trend you'll see that it can do a certain amount of load-following, it's just usually not done for economic reasons, as nukes have such low fuel costs as opposed to capital costs that it's almost always advantageous for them to generating at nearly any price. Now Germany, that

France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.

Nuclear proponents are completely delusional about the actual cost of this technology. Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion, and thorium is currently just vapourware. Come on guys, just get real.

France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.

Most electrical systems are not "free market" systems, as rates are heavily regulated by rate commissions and production is tightly controlled by government planning and approval. In any case, can you demonstrate that France's electricity price is not real? I'm pretty sure rate payers there don't see more than the billed amount get debited each month from their accounts. From a taxation perspective France is also lower than Denmark, so what's your point again?

Wind and solar can't scale to the levels needed yet. Two or three more decades of R&D and engineering are needed. No matter how much you wish otherwise this will not change. Even Denmark with its enthusiasm and pretty good wind conditions expects another 10 years to go from 30% wind to 50% wind, and expect to be using of North Sea fossil fuels for another 40 years.

Your options for electricity in the near term will largely be nuclear or fossil fuels. The goods and services you consume will largely be

There are no defective pipes as such. The defective components are the thousands of small diameter tubes inside the steam generators, which actually had already been replaced, a project many (actually most) of the older plants have done. Due to a design flaw in the components built for this plant, they were wearing out at an accelerated rate.

The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?

They would have to replace the entire steam generator. That's been done at a lot of plants, in fact the ones at San O were replaced but defective. A few hundred million. But San O is nearing end of life, shale gas is depressing market prices, and politically California is a hostile environment which has its own costs.

Some of the lost opportunity cost will be borne by the manufacturer of the flawed Steam Generators. But that plant has served well for decades even with an early shutdown.

Growing up nearby (Dana Point) the plant was affectionately known as the Dolly Parton museum. I imagine kids today have a more modern and equally inappropriate name. I for one will be sorry to see such a beautiful landmark be torn down. It will certainly make future vacations to the Grand Tetons mountains more poignant.
--El

some fucking idiotic nerd will defend the abomination that is nuclear power as great for the environment or some shit.

Yeah, like the environmental science nerds at NASA
"... researchers estimate nuclear power has prevented more than 1.8 million deaths due to air pollution between 1971 and 2009.
Given our fears, the findings are counterintuitive. But they're persuasive..."http://motherboard.vice.com/bl... [vice.com]

BTW, you do realize you are every bit the science denier as climate change deniers. Nuclear deniers are no different. They merely form their opinion based on left wing **politics** rather than right wing politics. Ne

Yes, because somehow spewing millions of tons of radioactive materials into the atmosphere is better for humanity than having nuclear reactors in place that do not pollute the atmosphere and cause cell mutation on a global level.

... The funds to decommission the site are collected during its lifetime as a tax and held in escrow. The operator has to by bonds to ensure cleanup in the event of an accident or shortful due to early shutdown. The point here is that even though they shutdown after only half it's expected lifetime, they've collected enough funds already to handle it even without the bonds to back it up.

Inflation makes it impossible from a practical perspective to pay up front. 4.4 billion 30 years ago would never have happened, and would turn into ridiculously large amounts of money today, and as such, ridiculous over kill.